Red France: Carnage in Paris

1871 - France loses the Franco-Prussian War, and is humiliated in Europe by the Germans. The French vow revenge.

March 18, 1871 - President Adolphe Theirs sends troops into Paris to take down cannons on the hills of Montmartre. Parisians rebel and hang Theirs' generals, and keep their cannons. Theirs prepares to attack; he receives help from the Germans, who occupied Paris.

March 28, 1871 - Paris elects a revolutionary government, the Paris Commune, to defy Theirs and his pro-German government. The Commune takes hostages and the people build barricades.

May 21, 1871 - "Civil war" erupts in the streets of Paris between Theirs and the Commune. House-to-house fighting ensues. Whole areas of the city are destroyed. (PoD) - The Commune wins the fighting and stage a coup d'etat against the Theirs government. The Republic is toppled, and a socialist state is formed.
 
What is happening outside of France, with the armies loyal to Thiers, fiercely opposed to the Paris Commune? They would not be easily subdued by Communard soldiers, even if Thiers was forced to flee Versailles. All of France would by no means be open to the Commune after any victory resisting an attack on Paris...
 
What is happening outside of France, with the armies loyal to Thiers, fiercely opposed to the Paris Commune? They would not be easily subdued by Communard soldiers, even if Thiers was forced to flee Versailles. All of France would by no means be open to the Commune after any victory resisting an attack on Paris...

Good question. I was thinking of having the deposed Theirs government flee to Versailles and set up an exiled government there. A full-fledged civil war erupts, and the communists win. The civil war would be an excuse to other French citizens that France was poor, and without the communists, they'd be worse off. Just bouncing ideas around right now.
 
Good question. I was thinking of having the deposed Theirs government flee to Versailles and set up an exiled government there. A full-fledged civil war erupts, and the communists win. The civil war would be an excuse to other French citizens that France was poor, and without the communists, they'd be worse off. Just bouncing ideas around right now.
The only problem - from the outset Thiers's government was based in Versailles. As in, the Palace of Versailles was its headquarters, where all important decisions were made. So Thiers would not flee to Versailles, he would never have needed to.
 
I was thinking that the problem was that the last thing that Bismarck and the vast majority of Frenchmen wanted to see was a communist France. The chance of the Communards winning is just about ASB.
 
What is ASB?

It stands for "Alien Space Bats", a cliche from an alt-history book (I think) written a while ago where the author changed the course of history by having Alien Space Bats land on Earth and start changing historical events somehow. Nowadays it's a phrase referring to anything totally implausible which happens in TLs (timelines).

I was thinking that the problem was that the last thing that Bismarck and the vast majority of Frenchmen wanted to see was a communist France. The chance of the Communards winning is just about ASB.

I'd have to agree with this. I'm not sure the Germans would be happy to support a group of rebels which it would surely be obvious from the outset are even more left wing than those who established and maintained the Republic already. On top of this, they've already won their war and exacted their peace, they've got everything they want. Doing this mere weeks after the end of the war would be extremely impolitic - can you, for instance, imagine the British government supporting German rebels immediately post-WW1, given how tired the country was after the war? Or the population agreeing with the government's actions. The country would feel too tired to risk more fighting, and the rules of diplomatic etiquette - which were still revered at this stage - would prevent them doing anything to kick an enemy while they were down. Doing so would ruin years of diplomacy for them, the rest of Europe would refuse to cooperate with them claiming that they had made themselves untrustworthy and the like.

Ultimately, I think if you want the Communards to win, it needs to be without German assistance.
 
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